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Pentagram's New Grown-Up Logo for Vsauce's YouTube Stars

Pentagram's Natasha Jen designed a new visual identity for Vsauce, a YouTube channel.

Jen wanted to bring the idea of "liquidity" into the design without it being too literal.

The wordmark uses a rounded font that feels soft. The V and W (for the community-driven channel WEsauce) can stand alone as monograms.

Jen's big goal was to give the channel, which has more than 8 million subscribers, a grown up look.

Jen's style guide.

How you imbue a sense of liquidity into graphic design.

Jen likes to provide her clients with a style guide so they can take the ingredients of an identity and ensure it grows alongside the company.

YouTube’s top channels aren’t networks—in some cases they’re bigger than that. And yet, if you look at some of the most successful channels on the platform, you’ll consistently notice the same bootstrappy aesthetic that could’ve been (and probably was!) designed as freebee from a friend who’s handy with Photoshop. The logos found on YouTube’s channels often reflect the loose and chaotic nature of the platform itself, which totally works for a young program. It’s the internet—let your poorly designed freak flag fly, guys! But at a certain point, as channels become bigger and more mature, the IDGAF web aesthetic starts to look less quirky and more...just bad.

Take Vsauce for example. The channel, known for its quippy science-focused videos, has more than 8 million subscribers and nearly 800 million video views. By all accounts, it’s a successful business, but for the first few years of its existence, it was defined by a logo that looked like it crawled its way out of a pile of Nickelodeon's green slime. “They had a lot of pukey stuff going on,” says Natasha Jen, a partner at Pentagram. It was messy, like sauce can be, but the logo didn’t need to be that literal.

Pentagram

Of course, the channel did well despite its logo and continued to grow its audience. At a certain point though, the guys at Vsauce realized that they’d never actually given much thought what their brand was or what they were trying to say, and who knows, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they did. That’s where Jen came in. “They had a very clear objective, but they didn’t know how to get there,” recalls Jen. What Vsauce wanted was to look grown up, but not too grown up. They wanted a visual system that would adapt as they continued to grow into not just a YouTube channel, but what could be considered a digital network.

What they got was a colorful identity system with a wordmark that’s just playful enough to honor the show’s goofy vibe. Jen started by thinking about the name. When you hear Vsauce you probably think of soy sauce or maybe a nice marinara. Makes sense. But the question became, how literal do you make a logo, especially when the name bears no real meaning? The channel’s previous identity centered around a splatter, but instead of leaning on a pictorial logo to express the name, she decided to design liquidity into the font itself. The wordmark uses Din Next Rounded with a bold V or W that can stand alone as a monogram. Each of the numbers has a liquidy drop tacked onto it, which Jen employs in the background to create a water-like pattern.

It’s a subtle, graphic nod to the idea of sauce, which actually was a point of contention for the channel. “We really had to show him what sauce could be in a design.” It’s a silly sentence, but it raises a good point. For many clients, design isn’t first nature. In fact, it’s typically not something they think about at all. A logo isn’t always an apple or a bird or a window, and that’s a good thing. Jen ultimately ended up creating 45 different logos—"Most were horrible," she says—in order to prove that a heavy-handed pictorial logo isn't always best. "It was a calculated risk," she adds. "They could've chosen one of the bad ones." Instead, they went with Jen's original idea to create a visual framework that the channel can grow with. Signs to point to this as the beginning of a new era in YouTube video design—Jen is already at work on an identity for another channel.